Before Berland, Montrose was under the stewardship of another former First Growth director in the form of Jean-Bernard Delmas of Haut-Brion.

The three oldest wines in this tasting, 1975, 1982 and 1986, are perfect lessons in how great Bordeaux can age, while the youngest show the benefits of the vast investment programme undertaken in recent years.

Read the rest of this column below the wines

Château Montrose wines

Click on the wines to see the full tasting note and stockist information. Stockist search aided by Wine-Searcher.com. Wines were tasted at Decanter’s Bordeaux Fine Wine Encounter in March 2017, where Montrose held a masterclass for guests.

And on to the tighter, more intellectual vintage of the two sparring partners of 2009 and 2010. You can feel the quality, the intensity, the more…

One of the great vintage battles of recent years is between 2009 and 2010, and this is…

Here we are fully crossing the threshold into younger, more primary aromatics, but they are also well integrated, beautifully softened and…

This is an actual masterclass in the ageing aromas of Bordeaux. It sits exactly at the spot at which you have a tightening in the…

A legendary vintage, and the colour is still holding firm. The mint is clearer on this than the 1975 and the fruit is a little darker and…

Less celebrated than 2009 and 2010, and you can feel the fruit is a little less intense through the mid-palate. Heaped with blackberry and…

1998 was better on the right bank than the left bank generally, but the clays of St-Estèphe helped many estates up here. And although Montrose has…

Here we start to see the slightly austere side of Montrose, and how this helps it to age so gracefully. Exceptionally young at 22 years old, still tightly-structured and…

One of the better vintages of the 1970s, from an estate that was recognised to have been particularly successful right from the…

Not a huge vintage, with some rainy spots, but this is a lovely Montrose that has…

A year when those cooling breezes from the estuary were essential. This displays sweeter, spicier fruit character than some years, and…

Château Montrose: How it all began

Théodore Dumoulin, the man who founded Château Montrose, lived just a few minutes away from my house in downtown Bordeaux at 4 rue du Palais Gallien. I walked over to it a few days ago to look at the still-handsome, if grubby, limestone building that sits between Place Gambetta, one of the city’s leafy central squares, and the remains of the Palais Gallien amphiteatre, built by the Romans to hold 15,000 spectators and that had been turned into a public quarry (still within the ruined ampitheatre walls) in Dumoulin’s childhood during the French Revolution.

He died in this house in 1861, 46 years after planting vines on a heather-covered hill on a far corner of the Calon Ségur estate that he had inherited from his father (also a Théodore Dumoulin) in 1812. The second Théodore sold most of Calon in 1824 – to a Bordeaux neighbour of his, the wine merchant Pierre Firmin Lestapis – but kept this corner for himself, naming it Montrose-Ségur (the most romantic explanation for this is because of the purple heather that made it a mont rose, or pink hill).

It’s kind of pleasing to think that he lived to see his new creation, planted on slopes overlooking the Gironde estuary – five kilometres wide at this point and the largest estuary in Europe – being named a Second Growth in the 1855 Paris exhibition, neatly overtaking his former property Calon Ségur that had to be content with a Third Growth ranking. He must have been happy with the wine at least, as he kept expanding his estate, bringing it up to 95 hectares by the time of his death, pretty much the exact size and footprint of vines as today (although they shrunk in size over the years before being replanted or in some cases reunited with the original estate).

Tasting through a vertical of any wine is instructive, but there is something particularly interesting in one that has such a grip on the imagination as this one. Montrose was one of the first estates in Bordeaux to introduce a second wine back in the 1860s – and a third wine at the same time for good measure (called, rather presciently St-Estèphe de Domaine de Montrose). This was under the ownership of industrialist Mathieu Dollfus – someone who would feel pretty comfortable with today’s Martin Bouygues I suspect – who introduced maternity benefits for his female workers and shared (some) profits with all of them.

It has long been seen as the First Growth of St-Estèphe, making wines with a classic interpretation of the appellation reflecting its deep gravel slopes and terraces that offer excellent drainage and a location that grazes the edge of the Garonne river – you can practically throw a fishing line to catch your supper from two of the 100-plus plots in particular, 84B and 84H – and so benefits from winds that keep the vines healthy. Jean Cordeau, an agricultural engineer who was head of the winegrowing department of Bordeaux Chamber of Agriculture before becoming a consultant said recently, ‘No vineyard could better look to the river than this one… I see less disease at Montrose than elsewhere, less viral disease, mildew, vinestock disease… It’s due to the ventilation’.

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